Examine critically the pluralist arguments against the theory of sovereignty. (1993)
The monistic theory of sovereignty holds that every political society contains one determinate, supreme and indivisible source of law. Between about 1900 and 1925 the English pluralists attacked it on historical, juristic, sociological and moral grounds. They exposed real weaknesses but confused legal sovereignty with political power.
The Monistic Target
- Jean Bodin (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576) defined sovereignty as supreme power over subjects, unrestrained by human law, though bound by divine and natural law.
- Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) made it absolute and undivided.
- John Austin (The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, 1832) gave it juristic form. Law is the command of a determinate superior who is habitually obeyed and obeys no one.
The Pluralist Arguments
- Historical. Henry Sumner Maine (Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, 1875) found no ruler who fitted Austin’s description. Ranjit Singh of Punjab could command anything, yet never changed his subjects’ customs.
- Juristic. Léon Duguit grounded law in social solidarity, the interdependence of social functions, which binds rulers as much as subjects. Hugo Krabbe wanted the notion of sovereignty expunged from political theory.
- Real personality of groups. Otto von Gierke, introduced to English readers by F. W. Maitland (1900), treated associations as real persons, not state-licensed fictions. J. N. Figgis (Churches in the Modern State, 1913) held that a church has an inherent life the state may recognise but cannot grant.
- Moral. Harold J. Laski argued that people with many needs owe allegiance to many groups. The state, one association among them, must earn obedience by performance, and its authority should be federal, not absolute.
- Empirical. A. D. Lindsay judged that the theory of the sovereign state had broken down. Ernest Barker saw the state as an association of groups with their own inner life. G. D. H. Cole‘s guild socialism added functional representation beside territorial.
Critical Examination
- Two meanings confused. Austin asked who makes valid law, not whom people obey out of loyalty. A. V. Dicey had already separated the legal sovereign from the political sovereign, the electorate. The pluralists refuted a claim to moral supremacy that jurists had never made.
- The arbiter returns. Colliding associations need an umpire. Robert M. MacIver conceded that only the state has universal, compulsory jurisdiction, and Laski called it the keystone of the social arch. A final arbiter is sovereignty under another name.
- Groups can oppress. Churches, unions and caste panchayats can tyrannise members whom only the state can protect.
- Class ignored. Laski’s own The State in Theory and Practice (1935) treated the state as the instrument of the owning class. Groups, the Marxist objection runs, compete on unequal terms.
- Robert A. Dahl (Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, 1982) later admitted that autonomous organisations can entrench inequality and distort the public agenda.
Conclusion
The pluralists failed to abolish sovereignty but proved it can be divided and must be justified. India’s Constitution vests sovereignty in the people while dispersing authority through federalism, minority rights (Articles 29–30) and panchayats. The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 found civil-society repression in 30 of 44 autocratising countries. Associations remain the working check the pluralists wanted.